Doug Austin

Here’s Your Preview of Next Week’s ILTA-ON* Virtual Conference: eDiscovery Trends

It’s almost here!  The International Legal Technology Association’s (ILTA) annual conference has gone virtual this year!  ILTA>ON starts Monday and runs throughout next week, with five full days of legal technology and professional education sessions, as well as several virtual social outings.  Here are some of the highlights and notable considerations for next week’s event.

In a press briefing earlier this week, Joy Heath Rush, CEO of ILTA, discussed some of the aspects of this year’s conference and how it came together:

  • The “I” in ILTA stands for International and ILTA>ON this year is more international than ever, with some sessions and events scheduled in Australian and European time zones.  Believe it or not, Joy and other ILTA leaders will be participating in some of those events, even though they occur in the middle of the night US time;
  • As of the press briefing, there were 99 sponsors and 1,200 attendees so far.  Because it’s a virtual conference this year, Joy says “people are registering right up to the conference” and she thinks it “could as much as double” by the start of the event;
  • It’s normally a 15 month process to prepare for an in-person conference, but the Joy noted that ILTA team had to pivot to turn it into a virtual conference within 3 months and that volunteers were a huge part to making that happen;
  • At various times each day, there will be “water cooler” chats to connect with other attendees – 45 scheduled so far.  They are completely random in terms of who you’ll be connected with;
  • Social sessions in the evenings include comedy bars on Tuesday and Thursday, a Virtual Wine tasting on Wednesday, Family Feud game on Wednesday and Match Game on Thursday.

Also, Monday is a free day for the conference, so you can register to attend Monday’s sessions for free.  They cover leadership and professional development topics such as communication styles, public speaking and diversity.

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The remaining days offer various educational tracks, so you can register to attend specific tracks on given days instead of the entire conference.  Here are the tracks per day:

  • Tuesday: Training/User Support, Data Science Track/ILTA, Knowledge Management, Legal Service Delivery and Law Firm/Client Relations
  • Wednesday: Litigation Support, IT Operations, Office 365, Marketing
  • Thursday: Tech Adoption/Artificial Intelligence, Applications, Finance (AM)/Info Governance (PM)
  • Friday: #CreatingTheFuture Together (2 tracks), Business & Legal Process Improvements

Here is a detailed schedule of the sessions for next week.

Each morning next week, I will highlight a few notable sessions that you may want to consider attending that tie into topics covered by this blog (i.e., eDiscovery, cybersecurity, data privacy, information governance, artificial intelligence, etc.).  So, that will give you a heads up on sessions to consider.

Two events that I will be participating in are:

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  • ACEDS LinkedIn Live on Tuesday (August 25 at 1:30pm CT): Mike Quartararo, President of ACEDS will interview me and we’ll discuss various topics related to eDiscovery trends.
  • Clawbacks, Redactions, and Formats…Oh My! on Wednesday (August 26 at 12:45pm CT): I’ll be participating with Rachel McAdams, eDiscovery Technical Specialist with A&L Goodbody; Cristin Traylor, Discovery Counsel with McGuire Woods LLP and Cindy MacBean, Litigation Support Manager with Honigman LLP (who will be moderating).  We’ll be discussing latest trends and best practices with regard to “clawbacks” of ESI and redactions of privileged and sensitive information.

Having spoken at several sessions at ILTACON in the past, I can certainly say that prep for my session this year has been as thorough as ever (if not more so), with two prep discussions among the panelists, plus an additional two prep sessions to go over logistics on Zoom.  So, ILTA is certainly doing everything they can to make sure the quality of the sessions is up to the excellent standard they’ve set over the years.

Member day passes for specific tracks are just $99 with full-week passes for only $350! ($199 and $599 for non-members.)  So, that’s one good thing – a lot less expensive than an in-person conference for plenty of activities and education!  Click here to get tickets.

Let’s face it, virtual conferences are probably the only conferences we’re going to see for the foreseeable future, so it will be interesting to see how this first major one within the legal technology industry turns out.  Kudos to the ILTA team and volunteers here for being the “guinea pigs” in conducting virtual conferences.  In addition to what we always learn at ILTA conferences, I expect we’ll learn some best practices for virtual conferences that will be useful as we attend more of them over at least the next few months.

So, what do you think?  Are you planning to attend this year’s virtual ILTA<ON?  Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

*Apparently, WordPress doesn’t like “>” characters in blog post titles; hence the substitution to “-“.

Disclaimer: The views represented herein are exclusively the views of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views held by my employer, my partners or my clients. eDiscovery Today is made available solely for educational purposes to provide general information about general eDiscovery principles and not to provide specific legal advice applicable to any particular circumstance. eDiscovery Today should not be used as a substitute for competent legal advice from a lawyer you have retained and who has agreed to represent you.

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